There were only eleven present on Sunday, August 14, when Edward gave the dharma talk, reading some of his favorite poems. I had come early at 8:00 to train Charles, who was learning to be Sunday doan, and Steve, who was learning to be Sunday shoten. The previous week, with assistance from Alison, Steve had served as shoten since Irene had been absent—she hadn't notified me—and Steve had done a capable job. He asked all the right questions, question after question after question, and seemed nervous yet grateful, eager, and glad. This week I was to be shoten, but needing the practice Steve agreed to take my part. Dean, the doan, had a couple of questions about minor matters and we also briefly discussed the recent reduction in the number of sangha members trained and willing to participate in temple services and ceremonies. Sally and David had moved to Alaska, Randy to New York, Kent to Laugh Out Loud, and Irene had been absent all summer.
I wasn't sure why.
"Martin, too," Dean added.
"Where's he?" Charles asked.
"He's decided he needs to find a teacher easier for him to work with than the master," Dean explained. "He's going to visit Zen centers in Philadelphia and Minneapolis and maybe others."
Hm.
First I'd heard of it.
I knew from a couple of one- and two-line emails only that Martin would be unable this summer to do the flower arrangements in the temple. Now I was curious, and after zazen, service, dharma talk, and questions I joined Dean, Charles, and Edward in the kitchen for doughnuts and coffee.
"I guess Martin has confided in you," I told Dean, "about the reason for his absence."
"Yes, he said he just didn't think he could work with the master and he wanted to check out other teachers."
Jane overheard our conversation on her way outside to weed the flower gardens.
She interrupted.
"That's what he should do," Jane said. "That's the right response."
"Yes."
I thought I agreed.
Perhaps.
"It must be nice to be young, single, and childless and free to explore options like that," said Charles.
Charles was fifty-six and looked younger.
He continued.
"Most of us—me anyway—don't enjoy that kind of possibility. I've got a job and wife and kids and I can't just take off and seek out and test and evaluate a dozen other teachers."
We all thought about it.
"For me this is pretty much it," Charles added. "The only show in town."
"But the Buddha did," I said.
"Did what?"
"He left job, home, family, wife, and child and sought a teacher. He gave up everything for truth and understanding. According to legend he even named his son for the obstacle his son presented to the quest."
I thought.
"It's usually translated 'Obstacle' or 'Tether'," I explained.
"Fetter," Jane corrected me.
She had come back into the kitchen from the garden, James, too, and he also felt intrigued by the conversation.
"Everybody's different," said Charles. "I need someone like the master, critical and stern."
Dean nodded.
"Yes."
"I like that, I need that, I know I do," said Charles. "Somebody to get in my face!"
Dean agreed.
"The master wakes me up," Dean said. "That's his special talent. He can do that to me like no one else. I think he does that to everybody," Dean added. "If he is present I'm wide awake. No one else I've ever met has been able to do that to me the way the master does."
I wondered.
"He has a special gift for it," said Dean.
Hmm.
I understood what Dean meant.
I wanted to agree.
I did.
But somehow it was different for me. I did not feel in the master the speciality that Dean felt. Perhaps it was teaching. Eight times a week, for two hours each time, I was responsible for what occurred in a class of college communication students. There I was always prepared, awake, alert, vigilant. I had to be. If and when I was not, I had learned in my first few years of teaching, I failed, I suffered. At no other place, not even at the temple, did I feel so awake, so alert, so aware, so responsible, so responsive to others, and so little conscious of myself.
The talent that Dean observed in the master—
Hmm.
My friend Billy had this gift and in him the form of it was so different from the form it took in the master, subtler and gentler and so much more magical, and Billy's friend and teacher and mine, O'Malley, had it, too, in such a mysterious, cunning, sophisticated, and intricate form. Billy and O'Malley were magicians. By comparison the master was a scold. His effort to wake me up was often an unpleasant confrontation—like my father nagging me to get out of bed to go to work at his auto parts store early in the morning.
"Get up, Robert."
Ugh.
Billy and O'Malley made me feel like Dorothy waking up in Oz.
Oh!
Dean was an organic dairy farmer and he worked with cows.
"I like cows better than people," he said in his dharma talk. "They don't send letters, they don't send emails, they don't telephone, they don't leave sticky notes, and I know how to relate to cows. I'm good to my cows. My cows have only one really bad day."
Mu.
I liked listening to Dean.
Dean was so funny, so dry, that I could not stop smiling, yet his humor was innate and natural and unintentional. Dean admired the equanimity of cattle, as I did, and in his own stolid equanimity he resembled them. Dean seemed elemental, competent, accepting, deliberate, ruminant, and quiet. I understood why cows were sacred, holy, in India, and I had often explained the reasons to my own students. I had never heard Dean be vulgar or rude or cruel.
Nor could I remember ever seeing Dean angry.
Just quiet.
"Why do we have to say anything?" Dean asked once in a practice period meeting.
Dean, too, felt he needed a teacher like the master, somebody to wake him up and to keep on waking him up.
"I think the idea is for us to wake up like that to everybody," I suggested, "and not just to the master."
Correction—
"For," I said.
Dean considered this for several seconds.
"For everybody," I explained.
I waited.
"I guess some people are capable of that," said Dean, "but I'm not."
"Nor I," said Charles.
Charles suggested that the question for every student of the master was whether one was following the instruction and advice of an enlightened master and teacher or just foolishly and voluntarily subjecting oneself to the demands of a man often abusive and self-indulgent.
I thought this formulation to be correct.
This was the issue, the question that each student had to answer for himself. Charles, like me, had also seen the analogy to a stern parent correcting the misbehavior of a child. Charles acted out a couple of brief scenes and dialogues between him and his son.
Charles explained.
"Sometimes I just feel I have to say, 'Now goddamn it—you're acting so and so!' and be stern and point out to my son what I think is obviously wrong in my son's conduct and attitude."
"Yes," I said, "but isn't the trick to do it without anger, without scorn, without contempt, without the humiliation, the superiority, the arrogance, the cursing, the mockery?"
"That's hard."
"Without the bullying?"
"Yes."
I said that I had known two kinds of Little League baseball coaches. The first berated a child when he made an error. In the same situation the second saw only an opportunity to offer instruction. I had read somewhere that one characteristic of a fully realized teacher was affability.
I mentioned this.
"What's affability?" Dean asked.
I had looked it up.
"An affable man appears to be approachable, easy to speak to, amiable," I said. "He seems mild, gentle, benign. Without even saying so he just seems inviting," I said repeating what I had read, "as if he would welcome remarks and questions even from strangers."
Though the master could be friendly, irreverent, and fun, I doubted that he had ever been called affable. Just the opposite, in fact—I had often heard people call the master stern, intimidating, and cold.
"Are you affable?" Dean asked me.
I thought.
"No," I had to admit, "but I wish I was."
"What are you?" he asked.
"Family and friends and even some students have called me brooding," I said.
"Am I affable?" asked Dean.
Hmm.
Dean appeared to me competent, cooperative, generous, gentle, and quiet, and he impressed me as a man who preferred to be told what was needed and then left alone to do the job and not be disturbed. I knew how much Dean liked silence, he had told us in the sangha more than once, and his body language and demeanor exuded it. I liked and respected Dean.
But was Dean affable?
"No," I said. "I'd have to say no."
He nodded.
Dean agreed with my assessment. He wondered if one could learn or develop such a trait and if so how. I didn't know. Charles remained skeptical of the entire premise and he made a wry face.
"Affability?"
"Yes."
"It sounds like glad-handing to me," Charles said.
I understood.
"Personally," Charles continued, "I detest that kind of thing in anybody."
I nodded.
"The more so in ministers and priests," he added.
Wagging his head from side to side Charles demonstrated for us an imitation of the parody we had all three seen the master perform more than once of a person trying too hard to be nice.
"I'm soo sorrry," Charles whined. "Do you want me to be niiice?"
Ick.
"No, no, that's not it!" I said. "I can't stand that either."
We considered.
Was there no middle way between that kind of sappy glad-handing and the peremptory, brusque, and profane? There was in our sangha no lack of respect—even reverence—for the master as the teacher, I said, so if the master wanted one of us or all of us to stop talking and to listen to him all that was required for the master to accomplish it was the slightest of gestures, an extended index finger, a raised hand, at most a forefinger to his lips.
Was it necessary to interrupt so rudely?
I wondered.
"Doesn't the master teach by his example?" I asked.
"Yes!" exclaimed Edward. "We all do."
I thought so.
"By example seems the best way," I said.
Dean nodded.
"Maybe it's the only way," he suggested.
No.
Charles remained unpersuaded.
"My friend says that in the final analysis it all comes down to having absolute trust in the teacher," Charles insisted. "He says you have to give yourself over totally, completely, one hundred percent to your teacher."
"No."
Edward and I objected.
"No."
"I know that Kudo would not agree with that," Edward said. "That is too easy. Servility is an escape, an avoidance. No, you have to have trust in yourself. There's nothing to rely on."
I agreed.
"Test every teaching against your own experience," Edward added.
"You don't trust the master?" Charles asked.
Whoa!
"I have absolute trust in his good intention," Edward said. "I do have that."
Edward thought a moment before he continued.
"But that's different."
"How about Nananda?" I asked. "I've heard others say she's kinder, gentler, more mellow."
I didn't really know her.
"I think so," Dean said.
"But she will cut your balls off if she needs to!" Edward joked.
He grinned.
But his hyperbole reminded me again of the stories and anecdotes of physical violence in the myth, legend, and folklore of Zen. Bodhidharma cut off his own eyelids so he would not fall asleep as he sat in meditation, the postulant Huiko cut off an arm to demonstrate the sincerity of his commitment in hopes that Bodhidharma would accept him as a disciple, Gutei cut off the finger of his young attendant to teach him a lesson he would not forget and, to bar a disciple, another teacher—I forget his name—slammed his door so violently shut that he broke the man's foot. More than once the master had told us this story and grinned.
It amused him.
Ha.
Months passed.
